Publications

We consider a dynamic Bertrand game in which prices are publicly observed and each firm receives a privately observed cost shock in each period. Although cost shocks are independent across firms, within a firm costs follow a first-order Markov…

Drawing hypotheses from resource mobilization and resource partitioning theories (RMT and RPT), this article examines how interorganizational competition and social movement industry (SMI) concentration affect the level of tactical and goal…

People’s opinions can deviate from that of the average group member in two ways. Descriptive deviants diverge from the average group attitude in a direction consistent with the desirable group attitude; prescriptive deviants diverge from the…

I investigate when side payments facilitate cooperation in a context with strategic delegation. On the one hand, allowing side payments may be necessary when one party’s participation constraint otherwise would be violated. On the other, with…

Self-consciousness has been shown to both increase and decrease the magnitude of prime-to-behavior effects. In this paper, we decouple the facets of self-consciousness into internal state awareness and self-reflectiveness and show that self-…

We find that equity returns associated with credit risk changes are attenuated by the debt value effect of the credit risk changes, as Merton (1974) predicts. We find that the relation between credit risk changes and equity returns is…

We analyze optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy with distortionary labor income taxes, nominal rigidities, nominal debt of various maturities and short-selling constraints. Optimal policy prescribes the almost exclusive use of long…

Many older US households have done little or no planning for retirement, and there is a substantial population that seems to undersave for retirement. Of particular concern is the relative position of older women, who are more vulnerable to old-…

We consider a cross-calibration test of predictions by multiple potential experts in a stochastic environment. This test checks whether each expert is calibrated conditional on the predictions made by other experts. We show that this test is good…

This article, published in the Center for Social Innovation Newsletter (Spring 2008, Vol. 4), summarizes a white paper that addresses trends in the development of socially and environmentally responsible supply chains with respect to the…

A well-known result in the Bayesian inventory management literature is: If lost sales are not observed, the Bayesian optimal inventory level is larger than the myopic inventory level (one should “stock more” to learn about the demand distribution…

We evaluate the asset pricing implications of a class of models in which risk sharing is imperfect because of limited enforcement of intertemporal contracts. Lustig (2004) has shown that in such a model the asset pricing kernel can be written as…

What motivates individual self-sacrificial behavior in intergroup conflicts? Is it the altruistic desire to help the in-group or the aggressive drive to hurt the out-group? This article introduces a new game paradigm, the intergroup…

We examine the press’ role in monitoring and influencing executive compensation practice using more than 11,000 press articles about CEO compensation from 1994 to 2002. Negative press coverage is more strongly related to excess annual pay than to…

This article examines the classic question of how religious diversity in a community affects church membership in a period of high growth and social change. Using panel data on local U.S. communities from 1890 to 1926, the authors estimate…

Max-product “belief propagation” (BP) is an iterative, message-passing algorithm for finding the maximum a posteriori (MAP) assignment of a discrete probability distribution specified by a graphical model. Despite the spectacular success of the…

The author critiques the decline of pragmatism and fact-based experimentation in U.S. education. Seminal achievements in U.S. education, such as the land-grant colleges founded in the 19th century, are presented as examples of the pragmatic…

Social interactions occur when agents in a network affect other agents’ choices directly, as opposed to via the intermediation of markets. The study of such interactions and the resultant outcomes has long …

Historical representations explicitly depicting Blacks as apelike have largely disappeared in the United States, yet a mental association between Blacks and apes remains. Here, the authors demonstrate that U.S. citizens implicitly associate…